From artificial mammal brains to prosthetics that feel like real limbs, the military’s blue-sky researchers are aiming to bring man and machine closer than ever before.
That’s because you don’t work for the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency, the Pentagon’s way, way out science and technology arm. Their annual budget request, which they made public on Thursday, reads like something out of lost a Philip K. Dick notepad.
DARPA, for the uninitiated, acts as the Pentagon’s blue-sky research agency, always looking beyond the horizon for the technologies which will have the greatest impact in the future. If you’ve ever found yourself wondering, Joker-style, where the U.S. military gets those wonderful toys—like the Internet, global positioning systems and stealth bombers—chances are it started out as idea on a drawing board at DARPA.
This year the Obama administration requests nearly $3 billion DARPA for the research outfit—a nearly $136 million increase over the agency’s last budget year. Tucked away inside that $3 billion are a number of new and fascinating projects: ones to make faster, more cooperative unmanned systems, to mimic parts of the human body for smarter computers, and to even build prosthetics that feel like real hands.
For instance, the $10 million Human and Computer Symbiosis program will teach computers to recognize when it encounters a bit of question that only a trained, flesh-and-blood expert would know—and then ask one of us meatbags for the answer. The computers will shoot a text to a predefined list of experts, learning more about the subject over time. Eventually, the plan is for the computers to become experts themselves and able to provide answers when asked a question.
DARPA’s Cortical Processor, however, takes the human-machine interface a step further by looking to mimic the mammalian neocortex. As it turns out, the cortex in mammals’ brains is pretty darn good at processing large amounts of data in real time and controlling multiple motor functions. Computing power like that can come in handy. So the Cortical Processor program will spend $2.3 million trying to develop a chip that behaves like a neocortex and equip it with a series of algorithms known as Hierarchical Temporal Memory (which are themselves based on the neocortex) to effectively create a cortex on a chip. The resulting chips could be used in battlefield systems such as unmanned aerial vehicles to more quickly make sense of the gobs of data hovered up by the military’s various surveillance sensors. The Cortical Processor builds off the research from a previous DARPA project “SyNAPSE,” which sought to make a chip which could imitate the function of a cat’s cortex. The program managed to produce a chip with “1 million neurons performing behavioral tests in the virtual environment,” according to DARPA.
Read the full article at - http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/03/06/the-pentagon-basically-wants-to-merge-you-with-a-robot.html
